European investors see IPO markets opening

London, 11 March: Most European investors expect to see an increasing number of clean technology companies floated over the next 18 months, according to a survey by investor communications firm Carbon International.
In a survey of 90 clean-tech venture capital and private equity investors across Europe, 65% considered an initial public offering (IPO) in 2010 or 2011 to be “a feasible exit” for at least one of their investments.
However, given the severe lack of IPO activity over the past 18 months, 87% said exiting an investment via a trade sale was more likely than an IPO.
A large majority (87%) of respondents reported that their environmental investments are either outperforming, or performing as well as, the general market. Despite this, the survey found a strong reluctance from investors to invest in early-stage or capital-intensive companies such as wave and tidal – and this could lead to a shortage of investable companies in 2012-13.
“Our survey reveals some positives: the environmental sector is performing well and there is a strong expectation that the IPO markets will re-open,” said Tom Whitehouse, CEO of Carbon International.
“But the survey also raises concerns. The majority of investors fear that early-stage sectors, particularly capital-intensive ones such as wave and tidal power, energy storage and bio-sequestration, will fail to secure sufficient funding to grow from either private or public markets. If so, it’s difficult to see renewable energy targets being met.”
One comment from the survey read: “Current capital market weakness is reducing the flow of capital and thus fewer companies and projects are being funded. This will lead to delays in the deployment of renewable energy and will probably delay the cost reductions required for renewable energy to become more efficient and competitive with existing hydrocarbon-based energy sources.”
Investors said they were most excited about opportunities in energy efficiency, waste-to-energy and solar. Fuel cells and biofuels were ranked the least exciting sectors, although Carbon International noted they still had “hardcore fans”.
Whitehouse said that “less glamorous” environmental sectors such as recycling, waste treatment and energy efficiency had good prospects of making money on the back of EU legislation.
One firm in the electronic waste recycling sector, UK-based environCom, is presenting to the London Stock Exchange later this month to gauge interest from public equity investors.
“One of the options we are considering to raise the funds for our expansion is the public market, and AIM [London’s Alternative Investment Market] is an option that we are seriously considering,” said environCom CEO Joe Quigley. “But at this stage we have no preference for public or privately raised capital. We are keeping our options open”.
According to Carbon International, other UK companies keen to gauge interest from public equity investors include Genwat, a waste-to-energy company, biofuels company TMO Renewables and solar power installer Solarcentury.

Honey bees secret world of heat revealed

Honey bees precisely control the temperature inside their hives to determine which job their young will perform in the colony when mature, new research has revealed.

By Richard Gray, Science CorrespondentPublished: 9:00PM GMT 13 Mar 2010

The secret of honey bees’ success has been discovered living deep inside their hives - a special type of bee which acts like a living radiator, warming the nest and controlling the colony’s complex social structure.
The “heater bees” have been found to play a crucial, and previously unappreciated, role in the survival of honey bee colonies.

Using new technology that allows sceintists to see the temperature inside the bee hives, researchers have been able to see how heater bees use their own bodies to provide a unique form of central heating within a hive.
They have found that these specialised bees, whose body temperatures are considerably higher than other bees in the colony, not only keep the hive warm but also control the social make-up within a colony.
Bees, and other social insects such as ants, share jobs within a colony so each individual has specific role that benefits the colony as a whole.
It is this division of labour that has allowed bees to become so successful as they behave like a highly organised, single “superorganism” rather than a cluster of selfish individuals.
Heater bees are responsible for maintaining the temperature of the brood nest in a hive, where young bees, known as pupae, are sealed into wax cells while they develop into mature bees.
The scientists discovered that the heater bees work to subtly change the temperature of each developing pupae by around a degree and this small change determines what kind of honey bee it will become.
Those kept at 35 degrees C turn into the intelligent forager bees that leave the nest in search of nectar and pollen.
Those kept at 34 degrees C emerge as “house keeper” bees that never leave the nest, conducting chores such as feeding the larvae and cleaning the nest.
Professor Jürgen Tautz, head of the bee group at Würzburg University, in Germany, said this allows the heater bees to control what sort of job a bee will fulfil when it matures and so ensure there are always enough bees filling each role within the colony.
He said: “The bees are controlling the environment they live in to make sure they can fill a need within the colony.
“Each bee in a colony performs a different profession – there are guard bees, nest building bees, brood caretaking bee, queen caretaking bee and forager bees, which are the ones we are familiar with as they leave the colony.
“By carefully regulating the temperature of each pupae, they change the way it develops and the likelihood of the role it will fulfil when it emerges as an adult.”
The findings will be revealed later this month in a new BBC series Richard Hammond’s Invisible World, where technology is used to give a glimpse into previously unseen worlds.
Thermal imaging cameras reveal how individual heater bees warm up the nest to precisely the right temperature.
By beating the muscles that would normally power their wings, heater bees increase the temperature of their bodies up to 44 degrees C – nearly 10 degrees hotter than a normal bee.
They then crawl into empty cells within the brood nest, transmitting heat to the surrounding cells where the bee pupae are developing. The waxy cells also help circulate the heat around the rest of the hive.
In the past beekeepers have seen these empty cells as undesirable and have attempted to breed queens that did not leave them empty, but Professor Tautz now claims they are an essential part of ensuring the health of a bee colony.
Warmth is essential for bees as they need a body temperature of around 35 degrees C to be able to fly.
The heater bees, which can number from just a few to many hundreds depending on the outside temperature and size of the hive, also press themselves against individual cells to top up the temperature of each pupae to ensure it develops into the right kind of bee.
Professor Tautz added: “The old idea was that the pupae in the brood nest were producing the heat and bees moved in there to keep warm, but what we have seen is that there are adult bees who are responsible to maintaining the temperature.
“They decouple their wings so the muscles run at full power without moving the wings and this allows them to raise their body temperature extremely high.
“Their body temperature can reach up to 44 degrees centigrade. In theory they should cook themselves at that temperature, but somehow they are able to withstand this high temperature.
“By creeping into empty cells, one heater bee can transmit heat to 70 pupae around them. It is a central heating system for the colony.
“Now we know that these empty cells are important, then bee keepers can try to avoid selecting for queens that don’t leave these cells empty. It can help to ensure that colonies can regulate their temperature properly and have the right mix of individuals.”
Temperature is known to have an influence on the development of young in other animal species.
In crocodiles, the sex of hatchlings is determined by the average temperature of the eggs during a key point in the incubation period, so if they are kept above 34.5 degrees C the offspring will be male.
Many species of fish and turtles also use temperature to determine the sex of their young.
Dr David Aston, chair of the British Beekeepers Association’s technical and environmental committee, said: “There has never been a good reason for the presence of individual empty cells across the face of the comb.
“Now Professor Tautz has provided an explanation and beekeepers will look more closely at the brood combs to see if they can observe heater bees at work.”
Richard Hammond’s Invisible World will begin on BBC One on March 16. The episode with the heater bees will be shown on March 23.

‘Green’ plastics may be worse for environment

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, and Kevin Rawlinson
Saturday, 13 March 2010
A type of degradable plastic bag that was supposed to be better for the environment may not be completely biodegradable, a Government-commissioned study has found. The bag is made with metal salts that are supposed to accelerate degradation, but scientists found the material was not fully biodegradable and might contaminate the way plastics are recycled.
Hundreds of millions of plastic bags and packaging items have been produced by the process, and they are widely used by some of the leading British retailers, including Waitrose, Ocado, JD Sports, Accessorize, River Island and Tesco.
Plastics with the additives are meant to break down quickly and fully in the presence of light and air by a process called oxidative degradation. But the term biodegradable is “virtually meaningless” said the Loughborough University scientists who ran the study. “The bags cannot be composted and there are concerns about the effects of the plastic in recycling facilities,” said the scientists, who added that the best way of disposal was incineration or landfill.

£3bn coal power plant will test strength of Ed Miliband’s environment rules

New plant in Scotland will have to prove that carbon capture technology works

Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 18.54 GMT
The first application to build a coal plant in Britain since energy secretary Ed Miliband introduced tough new environmental rules will be submitted next week, the Guardian has learnt.
UK-based conglomerate Peel Group is pressing ahead with the £3bn project to build a 1.6GW plant at Hunterston in Scotland, which will partially fit experimental carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Its former partner, Dong Energy, dropped out last year, citing the recession. The application, which is expected to be submitted to the Scottish government on Monday, signals Peel’s confidence that the unproven technology can work.
Hunterston is likely to become the UK’s first CCS plant, ahead of the controversial Kingsnorth project in Kent, which E.ON still hopes to build.
Miliband announced that Kingsnorth, and Scottish Power’s project at Longannet, will move into the final stage of a government-funded competition to build what it had said would be the UK’s first pilot CCS plant. But no winner will be announced until next year, making Peel’s project the most advanced. The technology is supposed to allow coal plants, which emit twice as much carbon as gas plants, to capture and store their emissions underground, but the technology has not been proven on a large scale and the government is relying on it working to meet its carbon targets.
Last year Miliband announced a radical new policy to force all new coal plants to be partially fitted with carbon capture technology. The government hopes the technology will be technically and commercially proven by 2025, by when all existing plants that have partially fitted the technology would have to use it to capture and store all emissions. But ministers have not spelt out what happens if the technology does not work or cannot be fitted to the whole plant. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace are concerned that if this happens, plants like Hunterston built under the new policy will remain open and end up emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
Greenpeace has campaigned for an “emissions performance standard” which would restrict the operation of coal plants that had not fully fitted the technology. A coalition of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and rebel Labour MPs narrowly failed to include the provision in the government’s energy bill in a recent vote.
Joss Garman, climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said: “This application is a worrying sign that the government has failed to shut the door completely on dirty coal in the UK. Despite huge uncertainties over their ability to pay for carbon capture and storage technology, [Peel subsidiary] Ayrshire Power has decided to go ahead with these plans and call Labour’s bluff.
“It will take a brave minister to shut down a functioning plant in the future, even if it has failed to deliver the clean coal technology it promised in 2010. That’s why an emissions performance standard is needed from the start, to warn companies they face tough legal consequences if they fail to keep their promises.”
Peel Group, which is backed by Saudi investors, owns airports, ports and a 28% stake in UK Coal. It is run by John Whittaker, 28th in last year’s Sunday Times Rich List with £1.3bn.

Government rebuked over global warming nursery rhyme adverts

Two nursery rhyme adverts commissioned by the Government to raise awareness of climate change have been banned for overstating the risks.

By Matthew MoorePublished: 9:25AM GMT 14 Mar 2010
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the adverts – which were based on the children’s poems Jack and Jill and Rub-A-Dub-Dub – made exaggerated claims about the threat to Britain from global warming.
In definitely asserting that climate change would cause flooding and drought the adverts went beyond mainstream scientific consensus, the watchdog said.
It noted that predictions about the potential global impact of global warming made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “involved uncertainties” that the adverts failed to reflect.
The two posters created on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change juxtaposed adapted extracts from the nursery rhymes with prose warnings about the dangers of global warning.
One began: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought.” Beneath was written: “Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense.”
The second advert read: “Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub — a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change.” It was captioned: “Climate change is happening. Temperature and sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heat waves will become more frequent and intense. If we carry on at this rate, life in 25 years could be very different.”
Upholding complaints from members of the public, the ASA said that in both instances the text accompanying the rhymes should have been couched in softer language.
The newspaper adverts were part of a controversial media campaign launched by the DECC last year which attracted a total of 939 complaints.
The watchdog found that the other elements of the campaign, including a television and cinema advert in which a father read his daughter a nightmarish bedtime story about a world blighted by climate change, did not breach its guidelines.
Ed Miliband, the Environment Secretary, said that that his department had been “comprehensively vindicated” by the ASA but promised to better reflect scientific uncertainty about global warming in future campaigns.

Water vapour warming

A loss of water vapor in the Earth’s upper atmosphere may have slowed the rate of global warming over the past decade, suggests new research. Although the decade 2000–2009 was the warmest on record, average global temperatures leveled off during this period despite a continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Now a team led by Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, reports that water vapor concentrations in the stratosphere fell by 10 per cent from 2000, offsetting — by 25 per cent — the warming that would otherwise have occurred since then. The team used an atmospheric model and a range of recent observations of stratospheric water vapor to reach their conclusion. Using more limited data, they also found that water vapor in the stratosphere probably increased between 1980 and 2000, a period of rapid warming. The increase in water vapor between 1990 and 2000 may have amplified the rapid warming of that period by as much as 30 per cent, they say.

The study confirms earlier work showing that water vapor has an important role in warming. It also partly explains the drop in warming over the past decade.
Source:
Nature, “Water vapor warming“, accessed March 11, 2010

Shooting of terrorist Dulmatin overshadows key media conflict seminar